I find all this whining about cloned meat funny, because it's a complete choice if you eat it.
You want the government to label your food, so you don't have to think, do your own research, or waste your weekend going to an organic farm to buy meat of your choosing.
Most of the beef we eat we'd probably have a problem with if we saw what hormones and antibiotics are pumped into it and why. This includes fish and dairy and poultry or such. Welcome to killing one species to benefit another. We could go back to hunting and gathering, but then we'd probably have little time to invest air conditioning, space travel, and the Intertubes.
If you don't like cloned food, go buy some land, put some cows on them, buy a big freezer, learn to dress and prepare an animal, and eat all the free range, clone free, grass fed beef you want. Hell, write the land off as agricultural to save on property taxes and sell the excess to your friends at a profit. Grow an acre of potatos and onions and make bloomin' onions and fries with it.
Why are you waiting for someone else to do anything?
The "evil-beef-lobbyist-corporate-anti-small-time-farmer-wants-to-kill-everyone-industry" probably doesn't want people to know they are eating "cloned" meat because they know that by and large no one knows what it means, but they've seen Star Wars and the SciFi channel so it must be bad. There will be panic in droves because they don't know anything about animal husbandry and just know the magic burger comes out of the clowns mouth with the 16 year old taking their order.
If you don't like cloned beef, don't eat it. There's no law requiring it and there's plenty of other things you can eat. Don't be such a lazy crotch-grabber and whine because the science (or lack thereof) is a mystery but god-forbid you put down the whopper.
The FDA's job is to approve or not approve applications sent to it from various private organizations for medicines, food, etc. It is not their job to set moral and ethical rules over what it researches, nor is it. If you think it should, don't whine when religious figures start dictating other parts of government around religion is schools, gay marriage, or wars against brown people for "moral" causes.
I know I never felt better until I started telecommuting.
I didn't even have permission, I just stopped showing up all the time. Our company finally got VPN so us slaves could work an extra 20 on the weekends, so I strategically started timing emails to be sent at 6:30am, 8:00pm, and other odd times. I used the time honored technique of finishing all the work early in the project, then acting like I was busting my ass for weeks on it at all hours. My sucker coworkers were turning things in early so they could get the reward of more work assignments, whereas I spent my time acting stressed and overworked while reading slashdot.
Because I had been sending all my status reports and such at weird hours, natually I would either show up later, or leave earlier, or any number of things to condition clueless management into not questioning since, because email has a 1-to-1 correlation to work, I was a 12 hour a day work machine so being home wasn't a problem.
Soon I dropped Fridays and Mondays more and more frequently and started increasing the email, conference call, and IM frequency of my "work" to keep the info flowing. A few strategically timed "sick" days that I "worked" from home cemented my obvious high work ething in management's meat-space, and I was barely showing up for one day a week.
I was enjoying doing nothing, especially when I decided to get cell network card so I could "work" from the car, Universal Studios, bars, strip clubs, and such but, and I will admit this, I felt I wasn't getting all I could out of work, such as that all necessary exposure to new technologies, new techniques, etc.
The solution was to get another job to fill my free time. I didn't want to violate some mystical employment contract (although I didn't have one, but I'm sure they'd frown on this), so I subcontracted through a shell corporation to, ironically, one of their competitors. I figured I was getting laid off at job "A" because they were having a meltdown (they were heavy in sub-prime holdings) so having a backup a few weeks early would be smart. Because of the confusing changes in management and dropped projects, I pretty much started ignoring all work requests (but emailed and conferenced called religiously).
Naturally, since I never showed up nor did any work I got a raise and was not part of the repeated layoffs. A few shifts in management made my work habits an assumed work allowance for me.
Next week, I will have been working for my employer and their competitor for one year straight. My favorite part was when my contract employer offered me an extra 20 hours a week (60 total) of overtime near the end of last year to finish some work early for them. My greatest joy was when my contract employer "B" gave my RSA SecureID so I could start telecommuting on the weekends.
Between the two of them (and the asian stock market) I have no debt and just bought my first house for cash a few weeks ago. Now I no longer have to work for either employer and bank every dollar in long term investments. I could go be a Wallmart greeter for the next 60 years. God bless America.
I attempted to get all my coworkers to telecommute, work from home, spend some time with the kids, and none of them would do it. Apparently all that "social networking" and in-the-box thinking was working for them.
With all do respect, this shows a level of ignorance. Our car insurance goes up because we get a speeding ticket. They are indirectly related, but the information is fed to them. My social security number, once just meant to be used for the social security agency, is now used ubiquitously all over. Medical records are compared against insurance companies to change your rates, or have your coverage dropped when you are statistically "too risky". It's almost impossible to just pay cash for medical services where I live, they demand drivers licenses and SSNs, even when I don't have an injury of a "criminal" nature (gunshot, etc).
It doesn't matter what you DO or DON'T DO as an individual, it matters what you appear to be statistically related to do. My privacy issues have to do with the ongoing battle of individual liberties versus the collective. I prefer to be judged on what I ACTUALLY DO, not what I MIGHT DO.
One bar I go to started using DL scanners at the door with off duty cops. I told them I would show them my ID, but I am not allowing any scanning to "record" my going into a bar or not. They said I HAD to be scanned, so I told them off and left. Obviously my age wasn't relevent, it was the tracking that was. I don't give a crap of their reasoning behind it.
I think anyone who believes that scanned information isn't used by anyone that is politically connected or pays for it (how else can local government pay for their runaway spending programs) from government is pretty politically immature.
You think that someone's MySpace ranting and blogging as a teenager won't one day be read by potential employers later on in hiring decisions? I can tell you right now that my clients do it, and I've helped them do so to form profiles of potential employees. You don't think financial services companies collect every bit of data that can be bought or found in public records about their clients and potential clients in order to market to them effectively? I've helped build the systems to report the data.
DNA scans are used in hospitals to determine all sorts of genetic illnesses you may have, and are available to insurance companies as well. As soon as they are available I assure you my clients will be using it to determine actuarial tables for the insurance policies.
From a government standpoint, COINTELPRO isn't a figment of imagination. Collection of data can cause serious problems for people. There's no difference between going to a bar to collect a drunk friend versus going to a bar to get smashed to a reporting engine. Reports don't contain the WHY something happened, just that it did. The difference between an insurance company raising my rates or denying me coverage and the government using my data for something, is that the former will make it expensive for insurance. The latter will get me arrested or dead.
In Soviet Russia...laptop...uhh...
Let's see. Can't have the laptop spying on you, as it already does that. The government spies on us, so no joke there. The border is making up regulations whenever they want. I guess the joke would be getting shot with an AK-47 rather than a M-16.
There's no joke there.
The concept of this being inefficient or a waste of resources isn't really the point. The same doorknobs who think that the post office, IRS, and FEMA are efficient are the same people behind this. It's about the continued transfer of power from us to them.
The basic premise is, government will go as far as you will allow them to screw with you.
It's all about power. Think about the people that go into government jobs anyway. I'm not talking contractors trying to make a buck off the government tit, I'm meaning the dregs whose primary job is to get hired in a job that is impossible to be fired from. Why else would jackass postal employees and DMV employees act the way they do if it wasn't that thrilling power differential between you and they? It's not like you can get your drivers license or social security check from someone else. You have no choice and they know it. The low level peons punish us and keep us from geting to many lofty ideas by preventing the removal of these assholes.
The border guards (or whatever we call them in America) know this stuff is idiotic...but screwing with someone over a nail file, or a laptop, or taking your shoes off just allows you to give one more inch into buying into the "Government is our all powerful overlords, we must obey them" mentality. It just makes sure you don't forget who is in charge. If you'll accept it, then it'll be that much easier to push a little more.
We must want it that way. We do it for the children. We want our children to grow up seeing that it's ok to blindly obey a government gone FAR beyond whatever anyone would have agreed upon when the country was founded. If our children our children see us bend over just a bit more, then it'll be easier for them to bend over JUST a bit more for their children.
The same happened when our grand parents sold our parents out, who sold us out. We have an insane level of tax laws that don't have any reality about how to fund government expenditures, just to control us. We have social security sucking away most of our money which will never come back to us, because our elders sold us out. We have every aspect out of control because they just went along with it.
But I digress. Letting the government search our shoes, belts, laptop contents, future brain scans for "anti-social" behavior, instant DNA or blood sugar checks for mental or hormonal conditions, prior to preboarding is a good idea. Why not? It's for the children.
Slashdot Mirror
I find all this whining about cloned meat funny, because it's a complete choice if you eat it.
You want the government to label your food, so you don't have to think, do your own research, or waste your weekend going to an organic farm to buy meat of your choosing.
Most of the beef we eat we'd probably have a problem with if we saw what hormones and antibiotics are pumped into it and why. This includes fish and dairy and poultry or such. Welcome to killing one species to benefit another. We could go back to hunting and gathering, but then we'd probably have little time to invest air conditioning, space travel, and the Intertubes.
If you don't like cloned food, go buy some land, put some cows on them, buy a big freezer, learn to dress and prepare an animal, and eat all the free range, clone free, grass fed beef you want. Hell, write the land off as agricultural to save on property taxes and sell the excess to your friends at a profit. Grow an acre of potatos and onions and make bloomin' onions and fries with it.
Why are you waiting for someone else to do anything?
The "evil-beef-lobbyist-corporate-anti-small-time-farmer-wants-to-kill-everyone-industry" probably doesn't want people to know they are eating "cloned" meat because they know that by and large no one knows what it means, but they've seen Star Wars and the SciFi channel so it must be bad. There will be panic in droves because they don't know anything about animal husbandry and just know the magic burger comes out of the clowns mouth with the 16 year old taking their order.
If you don't like cloned beef, don't eat it. There's no law requiring it and there's plenty of other things you can eat. Don't be such a lazy crotch-grabber and whine because the science (or lack thereof) is a mystery but god-forbid you put down the whopper.
The FDA's job is to approve or not approve applications sent to it from various private organizations for medicines, food, etc. It is not their job to set moral and ethical rules over what it researches, nor is it. If you think it should, don't whine when religious figures start dictating other parts of government around religion is schools, gay marriage, or wars against brown people for "moral" causes.
I know I never felt better until I started telecommuting.
I didn't even have permission, I just stopped showing up all the time. Our company finally got VPN so us slaves could work an extra 20 on the weekends, so I strategically started timing emails to be sent at 6:30am, 8:00pm, and other odd times. I used the time honored technique of finishing all the work early in the project, then acting like I was busting my ass for weeks on it at all hours. My sucker coworkers were turning things in early so they could get the reward of more work assignments, whereas I spent my time acting stressed and overworked while reading slashdot.
Because I had been sending all my status reports and such at weird hours, natually I would either show up later, or leave earlier, or any number of things to condition clueless management into not questioning since, because email has a 1-to-1 correlation to work, I was a 12 hour a day work machine so being home wasn't a problem.
Soon I dropped Fridays and Mondays more and more frequently and started increasing the email, conference call, and IM frequency of my "work" to keep the info flowing. A few strategically timed "sick" days that I "worked" from home cemented my obvious high work ething in management's meat-space, and I was barely showing up for one day a week.
I was enjoying doing nothing, especially when I decided to get cell network card so I could "work" from the car, Universal Studios, bars, strip clubs, and such but, and I will admit this, I felt I wasn't getting all I could out of work, such as that all necessary exposure to new technologies, new techniques, etc.
The solution was to get another job to fill my free time. I didn't want to violate some mystical employment contract (although I didn't have one, but I'm sure they'd frown on this), so I subcontracted through a shell corporation to, ironically, one of their competitors. I figured I was getting laid off at job "A" because they were having a meltdown (they were heavy in sub-prime holdings) so having a backup a few weeks early would be smart. Because of the confusing changes in management and dropped projects, I pretty much started ignoring all work requests (but emailed and conferenced called religiously).
Naturally, since I never showed up nor did any work I got a raise and was not part of the repeated layoffs. A few shifts in management made my work habits an assumed work allowance for me.
Next week, I will have been working for my employer and their competitor for one year straight. My favorite part was when my contract employer offered me an extra 20 hours a week (60 total) of overtime near the end of last year to finish some work early for them. My greatest joy was when my contract employer "B" gave my RSA SecureID so I could start telecommuting on the weekends.
Between the two of them (and the asian stock market) I have no debt and just bought my first house for cash a few weeks ago. Now I no longer have to work for either employer and bank every dollar in long term investments. I could go be a Wallmart greeter for the next 60 years. God bless America.
I attempted to get all my coworkers to telecommute, work from home, spend some time with the kids, and none of them would do it. Apparently all that "social networking" and in-the-box thinking was working for them.
With all do respect, this shows a level of ignorance. Our car insurance goes up because we get a speeding ticket. They are indirectly related, but the information is fed to them. My social security number, once just meant to be used for the social security agency, is now used ubiquitously all over. Medical records are compared against insurance companies to change your rates, or have your coverage dropped when you are statistically "too risky". It's almost impossible to just pay cash for medical services where I live, they demand drivers licenses and SSNs, even when I don't have an injury of a "criminal" nature (gunshot, etc). It doesn't matter what you DO or DON'T DO as an individual, it matters what you appear to be statistically related to do. My privacy issues have to do with the ongoing battle of individual liberties versus the collective. I prefer to be judged on what I ACTUALLY DO, not what I MIGHT DO. One bar I go to started using DL scanners at the door with off duty cops. I told them I would show them my ID, but I am not allowing any scanning to "record" my going into a bar or not. They said I HAD to be scanned, so I told them off and left. Obviously my age wasn't relevent, it was the tracking that was. I don't give a crap of their reasoning behind it. I think anyone who believes that scanned information isn't used by anyone that is politically connected or pays for it (how else can local government pay for their runaway spending programs) from government is pretty politically immature. You think that someone's MySpace ranting and blogging as a teenager won't one day be read by potential employers later on in hiring decisions? I can tell you right now that my clients do it, and I've helped them do so to form profiles of potential employees. You don't think financial services companies collect every bit of data that can be bought or found in public records about their clients and potential clients in order to market to them effectively? I've helped build the systems to report the data. DNA scans are used in hospitals to determine all sorts of genetic illnesses you may have, and are available to insurance companies as well. As soon as they are available I assure you my clients will be using it to determine actuarial tables for the insurance policies. From a government standpoint, COINTELPRO isn't a figment of imagination. Collection of data can cause serious problems for people. There's no difference between going to a bar to collect a drunk friend versus going to a bar to get smashed to a reporting engine. Reports don't contain the WHY something happened, just that it did. The difference between an insurance company raising my rates or denying me coverage and the government using my data for something, is that the former will make it expensive for insurance. The latter will get me arrested or dead.
In Soviet Russia...laptop...uhh... Let's see. Can't have the laptop spying on you, as it already does that. The government spies on us, so no joke there. The border is making up regulations whenever they want. I guess the joke would be getting shot with an AK-47 rather than a M-16. There's no joke there. The concept of this being inefficient or a waste of resources isn't really the point. The same doorknobs who think that the post office, IRS, and FEMA are efficient are the same people behind this. It's about the continued transfer of power from us to them. The basic premise is, government will go as far as you will allow them to screw with you. It's all about power. Think about the people that go into government jobs anyway. I'm not talking contractors trying to make a buck off the government tit, I'm meaning the dregs whose primary job is to get hired in a job that is impossible to be fired from. Why else would jackass postal employees and DMV employees act the way they do if it wasn't that thrilling power differential between you and they? It's not like you can get your drivers license or social security check from someone else. You have no choice and they know it. The low level peons punish us and keep us from geting to many lofty ideas by preventing the removal of these assholes. The border guards (or whatever we call them in America) know this stuff is idiotic...but screwing with someone over a nail file, or a laptop, or taking your shoes off just allows you to give one more inch into buying into the "Government is our all powerful overlords, we must obey them" mentality. It just makes sure you don't forget who is in charge. If you'll accept it, then it'll be that much easier to push a little more. We must want it that way. We do it for the children. We want our children to grow up seeing that it's ok to blindly obey a government gone FAR beyond whatever anyone would have agreed upon when the country was founded. If our children our children see us bend over just a bit more, then it'll be easier for them to bend over JUST a bit more for their children. The same happened when our grand parents sold our parents out, who sold us out. We have an insane level of tax laws that don't have any reality about how to fund government expenditures, just to control us. We have social security sucking away most of our money which will never come back to us, because our elders sold us out. We have every aspect out of control because they just went along with it. But I digress. Letting the government search our shoes, belts, laptop contents, future brain scans for "anti-social" behavior, instant DNA or blood sugar checks for mental or hormonal conditions, prior to preboarding is a good idea. Why not? It's for the children.
In Soviet Google, corners cut you!
Obligatory continued... In Soviet University, Davy Jones out scores students!
In soviet desert, rocks move you?